BENTHAM AND UTILITY 99
refused to discriminate in quality between various
kinds of pleasure. Pleasures could be distinguished,
and so preferred and sought "out by several tests : they
differed in intercity, duration, certainty, and pro-
pinquity. But they did not, said Bentham, without
hesitation, differ in quality. That is to say, he would
not allow that one pleasure was ' better ' than another
for that would introduce a new moral criterion.
Pleasures could and must be summed in quantity or
bulk. ' All other things being equal, pushpin is as good
as poetry/ By this he meant that so long as men were
really happy, the source of their pleasure did not matter,
provided that they were not interfering with the
pleasures of others, and thus undermining the greatest
good of the greatest number. This is plainly a hard
position to maintain, and later Utilitarians, notably
John Stuart Mill, did not endeavour to hold it. To
Bentham's apophthegm about pushpin and poetry, Mill
replied that it was better to be Socrates dissatisfied than
a pig satisfied. Bentham/s judgement is the more
strictly logical, since Mill's does introduce the complica-
tion of a new test of value apart from pleasure ; but
Mill's verdict is certainly more consonant with average
human experience. At the same time Bentham,, even
in his error, was emphasizing an important social truth,
namely, that there can be no graver menace to human
freedom than the interfering activity of well-intentioned
people whose one object is to make others better and to
show them the nature of ' real pleasure '. The Ben-
thamite doctrine, narrow and psychologically false
though it be, has an immense value, because it denies
the infallibility of the superior person who endeavours
to foist his own morality or his own type of happiness
upon others whom he believes to be the pitiful dupes
of ignorance. Bentham, with all his faults, did really